[TUHS] Algol68 vs. C at Bell Labs

[Nemo]

On 30 June 2016 at 15:21, Diomidis Spinellis <dds at aueb.gr> wrote:
[...]
> Two factors might had made the choice of 8088 a more practical one for IBM.
>
[...]
> In addition, the 8086 architecture was an extension of the 8080 one, which
> made it easier to make the MS-DOS API compatible with the CP/M one, which
> was used by many popular programs.  This would simplify their porting.  (A
> lot of early IBM PC software was written in assembly language.)

I heard that a lot of the BIOS was a simple-minded translation of
corresponding 8080-assembler.  I believe that; if you look at the
horrible assembler, which was actually printed in the IBM Technical
Manual, you could see that most 8086 extensions were not used.

N.